Our website is currently undergoing some maintenance updates. Please bear with us!
 

Archive for the 'Sculpture' Category

Sculpture

We exhibit many indoor and garden sculptures in metal, stone and ceramic.

(Right) Limited Edition Small Bronze Sculptures

We have on sale in the Gallery a selection of open edition cast resin sculptures and limited edition bronze sculptures. Please contact the gallery for more information.

Bernard McGuigan

Bernard McGuigan

Bernard McGuigan was born in Britain in 1956 and has been stone-carving since the age of 16. Though the realities of earning a living have necessitated quite different jobs at various times, he has been carving full-time for most of his life. He is an associate of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and has exhibited at the Royal Academy. His work has been shown in many exhibitions over the years and features in a number of private and public collections both in this country and abroad.

He identifies and exploits the relative properties of hardness and softness, colour and texture, in a range of stones including French limestone, Welsh slate, Scottish sandstone and varieties of marble and alabaster. Responding to the nature of each and, working directly into the stone, he has developed his own distinctive approach to the representation of the human body and the female figure in particular.

The pieces are graceful and deceptively simple, in terms of both their carving style and of their tranquil potency. When first coming across an exhibition of his work, we delight in the perceived tension between stone as a reliable and in relation to our own lives, timeless material, and what we know of the yielding (and less reliable) contours of the human body. With time this sensation may be remembered in the mind like a line from a requiem, quietly insistent. In returning to his theme and its many variations, McGuigan does not set out to “challenge” us in the contemporary and confrontational sense of the word. There is no mention of “removing boundaries” in his mission statement. On the contrary, in a form of homage to the way that stones have long been used to mark boundaries and places of passage, his figures appear to define the limits of individual tenderness in a harsh and competitive world. Standing between artist and spectator, they mediate the ever-present challenge of being alive.